Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the Editor-At-Large of TechCrunch. Mike is also involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub, in London initially.

A long time journalist, Mike has written for U.K. national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard magazine.

Since 1996 he has launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia's European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ""One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade"" by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London's creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best ""Web 2.0 and business blog"" in the U.K., by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. In 2009 it was named as one of the Top 10 blogs out of the U.K.

Also in 2009 he was named one of the Top 10 bloggers on Twitter in the U.K. In October 2009 he was named one of the Top 50 most influential Britons in technology by The Daily Telegraph. In April 2010 he was named as one of Britain's Top 100 ""digital power-brokers"" by Wired UK magazine. In November 2010 he was named as one of London's most influential people in New Media and ""king of dotcom commentators"" by The Evening Standard Newspaper. In February he was listed as one of the Top 100 most influential people on Twitter in the UK. He has spoken at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum and Le Web, among many other conferences. Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4, and Bloomberg.

Latest from Mike Butcher

Wahanda, the Health and beauty marketplace — which has grown to be Europe’s largest to date — has acquired Lithuanian-based Lemon Labs for an undisclosed amount, but understood to be in the seven figures.
The move comes at an important time for Wahanda, which, despite growing to a decent size on the web, has for too long ignored the mobile space. Clearly acquiring a mobile… Read More

Last year we covered how emerging markets like Africa were exploding with classified ad sites as the population comes online and begins the process of getting into marketplaces.
Saltside Technologies is deep into this game, and last year raised $25 million in equity funding, backed by Investment AB Kinnevik, a listed Swedish investment house specializing in emerging markets. Read More

A young girl, a Syrian refugee, suddenly appears before you, sitting on the floor of a cramped room. She describes her family, and takes you on a journey through the refugee camp in which she lives. You sit beside her in her makeshift school classroom and watch children tramp through the muddy streets in the encampment. You feel as if you can smell the bread being baked in front of you at… Read More

Speaking at the DLD conference in Munich today, Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick sang a rather different tune than he has of late. In recent times, the service has been fighting fires on a number of fronts, from controversies about its relationship with the media, to the safety of its riders, both in the US and in emerging markets. Read More

A new startup thinks it has come up with a platform to deliver a score that predicts a person’s creditworthiness, propensity to commit fraud and a number of other types of intelligence.
HelloSoda was founded by Paul Shepherd and James Blake, ex-head of Global Sales at Call Credit, the UK’s 2nd largest credit reference agency. They’ve hired engineers from Skype and LShift … Read More

Real-time video chat for the purposes of customer support has gained traction in recent times. We’re all, by now, familiar with the — slightly kitsch — Amazon Mayday support button for their Kindle Fire HDX, and since then there have been a number of startups trying to reproduce this feature. Industries like banking, financial services, insurance, real estate, retail and… Read More

With the rise of the subscription economy, you ought to be able to have a dedicated tool for measuring recurring revenue. Created by Nick Franklin, one of the earliest Zendesk employees, ChartMogul is like Google Analytics but for measuring subscription revenue. The market is SaaS, monthly-gift-boxes, online education, media subscriptions and the like. It is integrated with Stripe… Read More

Google’s Street View is an astounding service, unimaginable a few years ago. But photographing streets and stitching them together is a costly and time-consuming exercise. Mapillary thinks it has the answer, by allowing users to map the world with their smartphone and other cameras. Clearly heavyweight investor Sequoia agrees, because today it’s announcing a $1.5 million in a… Read More

Israeli public transport startup Moovit has raised $50 million in a new Series C funding round. That makes the company worth as much as $450 million. Last year we reported how Moovit was trying to reproduce Waze’s success with private car owners, but this time with public transportation users. But that’s only part of the story.
The investment is from Nokia Growth Partners, BMW… Read More

It wan’t long ago that Tablets were supposed to be taking over the Cash Register. Why have an expensive piece of dedicated hardware when you could have commodity hardware and just cycle through the best “point of sale’ apps? This was the future hinted at by Urban Outfitters when it made an announcement about moving its stores to iPad-based POS systems back in 2012.
But… Read More

UK-based Admedo has acquired Dispop, an online display advertising and retargeting specialist in New York. Terms were not disclosed. The move means Admedo can expand its business the US, which enables advertisers and agencies to manage their ‘programmatic advertising’ in-house instead of using third parties.
Programmatic advertising is on something of a roll, and is said to be… Read More

Crowdynews, a social media curation platform aimed at media companies that want to integrate social feeds into their output, has raised €2.5 million in funding in a Series A round led by INKEF Capital and joined by co-investor Singapore Press Holdings. The startup is currently providing service to newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, AccuWeather and other media… Read More

YOU-app is a new iOS app by Helsinki-based startup Fifth Corner Inc. which aims to gently nudge its users into healthier daily habits in the form of what they call “micro-actions”. Ordinarily apps like this launch and disappear, but YOU-app has a big gun on its side in the form of backer and internationally famous chef Jamie Oliver, who has been heavily promoting the app to his… Read More

Jobs sites are incredibly dull and boring. More often that not they are full of old or irrelevant jobs, presented in old fashioned interfaces. What is to be done? Jobspotting thinks it has the answer. Launching in the UK and Germany today (other territories are planned), this is a site and iOS app which essentially puts a modern search interface on top of results from third-party… Read More

Idinvest Partners and White Star Capital have invested in TheFamily, the Paris-based entity which combines co-working with acceleration and corporate engagement. London’s Index Ventures is an existing investor, as is Blablacar CEO Frederic Mazzella.
TheFamily has quickly risen to become one of the ‘new generation’ of players re-energising the French tech startup scene, and it… Read More

London-based health startup Yomp, formerly known as PleaseCycle, has raised $315,000 (£200,000) from five angel investors, to expand its heath and wellness platform which ‘games’ company employees into healthy habits.
Yomp’s platform is designed to encourage physical activity amongst a company’s employees, helping to increase productivity, reduce absenteeism and make… Read More

As with most countries, industry bodies designed to represent the startup community have sprung up. The UK has the non-profit Coadec which does its best to influence government policy around startups. As does Startup Australia. Now Poland is getting in on the act. Startup Poland, is headed up by many of the leading lights of the scene.
Co-founder Sara Koslinska says Poland’s capital… Read More

At times it’s been ever so slightly confusing that Silicon Valley venture capital giant Greylock Partners had a venture arm based between London and Israel, called “Greylock IL”, which was billed as an “affiliate fund”. This was not confusing to those who dealt with them day-to-day, of course, but the perception has often been that this was a simple overseas office. Read More

After expanding into London, TechStars, the accelerator which originally emanated out of Boulder, Colorado before reaching other US cities, is moving into continental Europe today.
It’s planning a June launch for its programme in the other major European startup hub, Berlin. This is the first TechStars in Germany, and will be run by Jens Lapinski, formerly of Techstars London, who happens… Read More

For years I have wondered: Why, if we can measure our fitness, or how many steps we are taking and thus get a measure of our overall health, why can’t we do the same with the environment? Why can’t someone create an app which “gamifies” us into cycling rather than driving, or taking a train or just generally pump less CO2 into the atmosphere, and creating global weirding? Read More